On Monday, former EBay CEO Meg Whitman, the one-time Mitt Romney supporter who was also on John McCain’s list of possible vice presidential candidates before he chose Sarah Palin, gave her first interview since she announced last week that she is running for California governor.

Asked by the reporter for the Los Angeles Times to defend her support of Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that repealed the right of gays to marry in the state, the New York transplant, who made her fortune in the gay-friendly Bay Area, said her opposition to gay marriage was a “matter of personal conscience and my faith.”

So is she a Mormon, a Catholic, an evangelical Protestant or an orthodox Jew?

No. She’s a Presbyterian.

While the Presbyterians are debating gay rights, and the church does not sanction gay unions, the church as not undergone the sort of upheaval that has roiled the usually stodgy Episcopal Church, where anti-gay schismatics have left the U.S. diocese to join the African Anglican church that advocates imprisoning gays.

Sorry. Just does not pass the smell test. Or rather, it stinks to high heaven of a purely tactical move to try to garner votes of GOP primary voters. Indeed, Whitman’s support of Proposition 8 was a surprise among her former employees and colleagues in the Silicon Valley, according to an article two months ago in Gawker’s Valleywag:

As the CEO of a company in a liberal industry in a liberal region, Whitman never gave a hint that she didn’t value gay and lesbian employees’ relationships. It turns out she was just being politic.

Whitman’s longtime executive assistant, Anita Gaeta, is a lesbian, who owns a house with her partner in San Jose. [Gawker's Valleywag] tried to contact Gaeta to get her views on the matter, but she did not respond. [Valleywag has been informed that] Gaeta continues to work for Whitman.

But leave personal feelings aside. As a practical matter, Whitman’s support of Proposition 8 may backfire in fundraising and in the general election. Several current and former eBay executives, including founder Pierre Omidyar, lent their name to a newspaper advertisement opposing Proposition 8. Will they support Whitman’s campaign now? Unlikely.

Her stance could also hurt her former employer’s business. Already, eBay sellers are organizing a boycott because of Whitman’s stance. And no company likes to be drawn into controversial causes. One might think that her handpicked successor, John Donahoe, might prevail on Whitman to moderate her stance for that reason alone.

Both Whitman’s GOP opponents, former Representative Tom Campbell and state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, support gay marriage.

In the Times interview, Whitman came out against the lawsuit by former Clinton prosecutor Ken Starr to annul the marriages of the 18,000 or so gay couples who were married in California last year. She also said she supports gay adoption, the legality of which is not under assault in the state.

But forget gay marriage. One stand she took ought to be enough to kill her chances in the general election next year — and may even undo her prospects in the primary. No, not abortion:

Whitman also cited economic concerns as she expressed an openness to new offshore oil drilling, a stand that has harmed other Republicans seeking statewide office. New drilling techniques, she said, might offset the environmental risk.

“I would ordinarily say no, but I think given these economic times I want to look at the technology again,” she said.

Whitman is pro-choice, as are Campbell and Poizner, a stand that makes them all vulnerable in the primaries to an insurgent, anti-abortion candidate from the extreme right. The percentage of registered Republicans in California is 31.3 percent, the lowest it has ever been — and those who remain tend to be as anti-choice as they are anti-gay.

Because conservative and moderate registered independents who tend to be pro-choice cannot vote in the Republican primary, this tends to leave the primary field open to right-wing extremists. In the 1999 gubernatorial campaign, then-Lt. Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat, incited outrage among moderate Republicans when he ran ads pointing out moderate GOP candidate — and former Los Angeles mayor — Richard Riordan’s pro-choice stance during the GOP primary. Davis’ ads upended the Republican primary. Riordan was defeated by Bill Simon, a doctrinaire conservative ideologue who was easily defeated in the general. (Moderates got their revenge in 2003 when Arnold Schwarzenegger defeated Davis in a recall election.)

The Times reporter described Meg Whitman’s performance during the interview as “[vacillating] between that of a confident, take-charge chief executive officer delivering a PowerPoint presentation to that of an ill-at-ease novice who has studied stacks of policy binders, but has yet to master the art of political maneuvering.”

Whitman described herself as a lifelong Republican, which is hard to square against the fact that she was a registered independent until 2007. She says she changed her registration to the GOP then so she could vote in the presidential primary on Feb. 5, 2007, for her friend, Mitt Romney — the Mormon former Massachusetts governor who once claimed to support gay rights but ran for the GOP nomination using harsh anti-gay rhetoric.

She has aligned herself with former Gov. Pete Wilson, who remains one of the most widely reviled politicians in the state, and whose campaign to pass Prop 187, which would have made it illegal for government agencies to provide healthcare and education to the children of undocumented immigrants is generally considered to be the cause of the collapse of the Republican Party in California.

In the interview, Whitman broke with Wilson over Prop 187, which passed overwhelmingly but was overturned in the courts:

“I would not have been prepared to strip all of those services away from children,” she said.

At the same time, however, Whitman said Tuesday that schools, hospitals and law enforcement agencies should be required to report undocumented immigrants to federal authorities. She later backtracked on schools, saying, “I want to think about that a little bit.” She also said she opposed the issuance of drivers’ licenses for those in the country illegally.

Whitman reportedly has a net worth of $1.4 billion. She is married to Dr. Griffith Rutherford Harsh IV, a neurosurgeon in Stanford. They have two children.